going home

I’ve been billing myself as a part-time eventer on the internet for a while now. It’s accurate enough, I guess, and has been, but to some degree it’s been a lie since the first day that I typed it into one of my description boxes (I couldn’t tell you which one came first. Tumblr, probably). I’ve been an eventer for years, but at the same time, up until this past weekend, I hadn’t evented—truly evented—since 2009.

A lot of that wasn’t by choice. I was limited on barn options when I came back to riding at sixteen, limited on where I could go and who I could ride with, and there was a huge obstacle between me and most of the eventing trainers in the area at that time (my then-former, now current trainer included)—I didn’t own a horse. There were several people with programs that I was interested in, but without a horse of my own to bring along, they weren’t really available to me, so I tried to make the best of what I had. I found a hunter-jumper trainer, and I went and did that, and it was fine, but… it wasn’t me. Not really. I still remember the day that we were out on a trail ride toward the end of my tenure in that program and I jumped a log out in a field and remembered for one fleeting minute what cross-country felt like, something that I hadn’t gotten to feel in eight years at that point—something that made abundantly clear what I think I had probably always known, that it was eventing first and forever and I couldn’t change that no matter how hard I might have wanted to at some points.

I dipped my toes in here and there after I moved to my current barn—I jumped the log out in the field, and we went on a hunter pace, and went cross-country schooling at my favorite local venue the night before a hunter/jumper show—and it wasn’t quite the same, but it was better. It was freer. I could go do those things that I had always enjoyed doing as a kid—cooling out in the field after we were done riding, popping over jumps whenever I felt like it, doing dressage rides and allowing myself to sink back into this world that I’ve known for so long and had been so far away from through my teenage years. We tried to go to a mini trial back in 2019, but it didn’t work out that year (for a very good reason), and so… I waited.

I waited, and I rode my horse—this horse that I finally had after years of waiting, this horse that I bought off of nothing more than a feeling and an incredibly basic vet check—and I tried to imagine this three-year-old that I loved so much, who was just figuring out how to be under saddle somewhere other than the track, one day having the ability to reach for the contact and use himself and jump and do all of these things that had been just out of reach for so long, and then I waited some more. I waited through the rain rot saga, through our first (and only, at least so far) lesson with my trainer, through stifle issues and body soreness and my job getting in the way and my new job and my own personal struggles that keep me exhausted pretty much always and the abscess that brought us into this summer and kept us from going to the schooling show that I was originally planning to go to, and then it was the end of July and we were out in the field and I decided to pop him over some of the fences out there (despite knowing his proclivity for throwing in excited bucks after fences when jumping outdoors), and he was just… I won’t say he was perfect, but he was so game even with all of the baby horse silliness that I knew in that moment that I needed to enter him in the mini trial at the beginning of September at that local venue that I love so much.

I have a long-standing relationship with the venue in question, and I don’t just mean that from my own riding perspective. The first show I ever remember being at as a kid was at that venue, the show where I watched my cousin ride and thought to myself “I want to learn how to fly,” the show that arguably really started this whole thing. I did my first off-property cross-country schooling with heart horse number one at that venue when I was eleven years old—my first time leaving the farm, period—and I did my first (and only, up until yesterday) mini trial there too a year later. During those years when I wasn’t riding as a teenager (and even when I was), we’d go to the state park down the road from it to go hiking, and I would stare through the trees to where I knew the cross-country jumps were as we drove past, and I would just want. I wanted it so badly, wanted to go back to where I knew I was supposed to be, to what I knew I was supposed to be doing. In a lot of ways I didn’t really care about where I made that return, but… doing it there seemed like the right place, given everything.

I made my return yesterday. I went home yesterday, for the first time in twelve years (and two months and twenty-nine days), and what a homecoming it was.

It wasn’t perfect. It was the furthest thing from perfect. I didn’t ride my dressage test on Cooper a single time before I went in and did it in the ring at the mini trial yesterday, so I had absolutely no idea where our difficult spots were going to be, and I should’ve given him a longer warmup to settle before we went in, because he will go on the bit and lift his back and bend and give a proper free walk if he’s relaxed but he was too keyed up for that to happen during our test and our score reflected that. He refused the first fence in show jumping, partly due to baby horse distraction and partly due to rider error—I could’ve set him up better and made sure he was paying attention—and that dropped us from second to third because the other two people in our division went clean. Out on cross-country, though…

I bought him off a feeling. I couldn’t tell you what that feeling was in March of 2019, and I couldn’t tell you now either. I just looked at him, and I knew, and yesterday confirmed that I was right. He looked at every fence when we schooled on Saturday—of course he did, up until that point the only cross-country jump I’d ever taken him over was a tiny beam jump at a venue where we’ve gone schooling a couple of times—but there were no dirty stops. There were no dirty stops, there was no bucking after the jumps, there was nothing more than “Huh, this is new, let me check it out” and him being absolutely stellar afterward. Yesterday he went out and powered around that course like he’d been doing it for years without looking at anything (jump judges included), and I had to keep holding him back because we were doing Very Green and if I let him go the pace he wanted to go we would’ve had an unspeakable number of speed faults (plus the footing was a bit deep courtesy of on-and-off rain all day combined with the hurricane storms earlier in the week, so trotting 90% of the course was safer anyway).

I have an absolute resting bitch face when I’m riding most of the time. It’s my concentration face, it’s just what happens when I’m focused, and it makes me look like I’m not enjoying my rides. In nearly every picture from yesterday, I’m grinning. Even with the baby horse stiffness and the refusal and the rain, I was just so happy that I couldn’t stop smiling. The fences weren’t big and our dressage test was only walk-trot and we weren’t anywhere close to perfect and have about eight hundred million things to fix and I am a certified Mess™ because I haven’t been riding enough and I’ve barely jumped at all the last two years so my equitation is currently ??????, but I was happy, because that’s where I’m supposed to be, and I’ve known that, and yesterday I finally got to go home.

It also made me realize something—show jumping makes me nervous now, but cross-country doesn’t at all. I got overfaced enough in my last training situation that everything about show jumping makes me get up in my head, but I never overthink cross-country. I never worry about the fences, I never worry about how it’s going to go, I just go out there and I do it because the refusal to take part in it that went with my last training situation (which wasn’t my choice) means that it never had the opportunity to be messed with. My confidence out there was never damaged, because there was no chance for it to be. It makes no sense, because cross-country fences are solid and in theory the whole thing is much more difficult than the show jumping phase ever will be, but for me cross-country is as easy as breathing. It’s my happy place. It has been for, god, almost fifteen years now, and as much as I hated not having it for all those years… I’m glad it was never spoiled. I’m glad it can still be for me now what it was for me when I was twelve years old. I didn’t know I still had anything that could make me feel that way, but I guess I do.

We have a lot to work on, and I know there are going to be questions to be answered in a year or two about my training situation (read: I need my trainer regularly yelling at me (in a nice way) to really make a go of this whole thing, and I’m going to have some big decisions to make about a whole bunch of stuff depending on how a few other things go), but for now… For now I have a certified baby event horse, and a third-place ribbon to match that third-place ribbon that I won at this same mini trial when I was only twelve years old, and I’m so glad that I listened to myself. I’m glad I listened to myself about what I knew I should be doing, that I listened to myself when it came to making some hard choices, that I listened to myself when I saw that ad on CANTER two and a half years ago and felt that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I hadn’t felt since I was eleven years old.

This horse and this discipline own my whole heart, and nothing about this has been easy but I wouldn’t change it for anything. Not now. Not when I have this feeling about what it is and what I know it could be (at the end of our test our dressage judge went “Let me guess, young OTTB?” and I said yes, that it was his first time out and I was just trying to get through the whole thing alive and worry about the rest of it later, and she told me that he’s a lovely horse and it was a good test with all sorts of potential, we just need to dot our i’s and cross our t’s (aka, clean up the details) and we’ll be set). We’ve got a long way to go and a lot to do and my wallet is about to be even angrier with me than it already is as I try to make this whole thing happen, but… I’m back. We’re back, finally.

It’s good to be home.